Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: "When the Sea Rises" recounts a delightful mini-romance; "Cartier-Bresson" spends time with the father of all photographers

If you take "Lost in Translation," reverse the genders of the would-be lovers, and transport it to a series of nowheresville towns in the north of France, you might end up with something like Gilles Porte and Yolande Moreau's "When the Sea Rises," a delightfully off-kilter love story. I don't want to oversell this winsome little movie, but if you want a bittersweet but cheerful pick-me-up on a cold winter evening, it's just the ticket.

Moreau, herself a well-known French comedian, stars as Irène, a woman of 45 or so who makes her living by touring her one-woman clown show tirelessly from small town to small town. (The show we see in the film is apparently one of Moreau's staples in real life.) A mixture of wistful sentiment and bawdy humor, Irène's performance will only seem implausible if you've never been exposed to the distinctly odd flavors of French humor. Moreau is a few kilos overweight and none too young, and her onstage character is a sort of French-housewife caricature, simultaneously horny, ugly, bloodthirsty and romantic.

You'll grasp right away that Irène is a sweet soul, and pretty lonely in between phone calls home to her husband. But not until a moped-driving Belgian drifter named Dries (Wim Willaert), who is maybe a decade younger, begins to follow her around like a puppy do we notice that she is also, in her own aging earth-mama way, actually quite lovely. Dries has no visible means of support and lives in a warehouse full of giant carnival puppets (I swear, it's not as icky as that sounds), but you can see in his eyes that this ambiguous almost-romance with a performing artist -- albeit one who plays a lecherous murderess with leeks in her handbag -- is the best thing that's ever happened to him.

Give this a try without expecting too much, and you'll see. "When the Sea Rises" gets both a lot sexier and a lot funnier as it goes along, with a few patches of darkness along the way. Porte and Moreau also demonstrate a sharp eye for the flat landscape and vertical planes -- trees, power pylons and factories -- of the unremarkable countryside along the Franco-Belgian border. (For some reason I can't explain, that area has produced several excellent films in recent years.) This comic tale of l'amour fou is worthy of Irène's onstage harridan, and along the way it captures some remnants of a European performing tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages. (Opens Jan. 13 in New York; other cities may follow. DVD release will follow later in the spring.)

Swiss filmmaker Heinz Bütler's documentary "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye" will mostly interest photo buffs -- but if that's you, then rearrange your Netflix queue today. This is an ambling, relaxed talking-head docu in the grand European style: I'm not sure that Isabelle Huppert contributes much to our understanding of the 20th century's defining photographer, the man who blended fine-art photography and photojournalism such that they could never fully come undone, but watching her sit there and leaf through his pictures is in a sense its own reward.

Bütler also talks to such important Cartier-Bresson disciples as Elliot Erwitt, Josef Koudelka and Ferdinando Scianna, but the movie is most noteworthy for including both Cartier-Bresson's last extensive interview (he died in August 2004) and also one of Arthur Miller's last (he was a longtime friend). Thankfully, much of the film is devoted simply to admiring the remarkable geometric and documentary power of the great man's pictures, whether from 1930s Mexico, the Soviet Union, Nazi-occupied France, the Jim Crow South, Gandhi's India, and any number of other backwaters and hot spots. The more of these photographs you see, the more you realize that Cartier-Bresson didn't just capture the century, he defined the way we saw it and understood it.

(Opens Jan. 13 at the Quad Cinema in New York, and will be released Feb. 14 on DVD.)

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